#5 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

My favourite Narnia book is either The Silver Chair or this one. The reason Dawn Treader is on the list, is not that it is the better book necessarily (in fact it's quite episodic and not quite so unified as Silver Chair) but the atmosphere, sense of voyage adventure, and sheer numbers of ideas that fill its pages. Oodles of characters help offset the loss of Peter & Susan, and the images echoing aspects of the Christian life and faith abound.

And especially it is the feeling of light that pervades the book, as the ship draws closer to the mysterious edge, and Reepicheep's desires mirror the person caught up in the pursuit of God and heaven. If The Lion, the Witch &the Wardrobe helped many to grasp the idea of substitutionary atonement and let it settle in their subconcscious until they heard the gospel, then Dawn Treader engraved a sense of the comfort-terror of the pursuit of heaven, of the longing for joy, onto mine.

Plus, using my 'stuck on a desert island' criterion, what book could be better?!